Men, women and unions

Abstract

The paper examines whether workplace gender dynamics contributed to the decline of unions. To this end, it reviews relevant literature and proposes three hypotheses, which it then tests using alternative empirical analyses and data from Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) and British Social Attitudes Survey (BSAS). The results from employee-level analysis reveal that, compared with women, (i) men were significantly less likely to have never been union members and (ii) they were also significantly more likely to have been union members in the past. In addition, workplace-level analysis using WERS reveals that there is an inverse link between union membership and the share of women in workplaces, which is also found to have a non-linear form. The paper ponders if unions may need to encompass broader agenda than those informed by the median voter to improve their fate.